WHY I STAND UP FOR VICTORY GUNDAM

TONY T. - Managing Editor, 3rd Year, Economics and Data Science

"This look at things somewhat ignores non-Universal Century series."

Tomino Yoshiyuki is a creator I respect greatly given his contributions to and influence on Japanese animation, along with the wider associated otaku culture. In particular, it’s easy to discuss Mobile Suit Gundam for the impact it had on the industry. It is equally simple to discuss the brilliance of Space Runaway Ideon, though it may not be as easily accessible to a wide audience given how that series didn’t revolutionize anime. What I appreciate heavily about Tomino’s works, particularly his Gundam works, is his dedication to themes. This often comes at the detriment of proper storytelling, however. Tomino can tell a good, clear, story – he’s done this on numerous occasions with entries like the original Gundam or Zeta. Still, works like Gundam: Reconguista in G, for instance, demonstrate his predilection towards themes and motifs without considering the audience’s ability to interpret them. I enjoy Reconguista in G for its manic sense of getting through various ideas Tomino enjoys, but it is completely incomprehensible as a series.

On the other hand, Mobile Suit Victory Gundam is a series most lambast for its simplistic, cartoonish portrayal of dark subject matter, with its infamously high death count and the brutal ways the characters suffer. While I do acknowledge and agree with this perspective, I have a hard time considering it a negative. Most of Tomino’s shows, including his widely renowned works, all deal with mature concepts in somewhat simplistic ways. I daresay that’s the very appeal of the original Mobile Suit Gundam – an introduction to the horrors of war via the allegory of giant robots fighting a space war, if you will. That’s the reason why the series initially met only lukewarm responses, before exploding in popularity once cinematic recuts hit theaters and targeted a slightly older demographic than the toy-loving children that Sunrise probably intended it for. Still, Gundam is fundamentally a story directed towards adolescents and arguing against the romanticization of war as a destabilizing force for society, yet demonstrating that it is inevitable.

The grander Universal Century timeline is rather dour in this sense. Taking ∀ Gundam as the logical end to Tomino’s view of the franchise, its inclusion of the Universal Century alongside other alternate universes of the franchise as part of its backstory fits into this look. These seemingly disparate and incompatible histories being canonized together implies that in Tomino’s view, even if human civilization completely collapses and starts anew, conflict will inevitably brew as a part of human nature. That Gundam fans romanticize aspects of Gundam like robots or pilots is perhaps missing the very point of the larger universe that Tomino wishes to imply. His method of implying this existentially terrifying concept is perhaps limited to be more simplistic and cartoonish, but there’s a reason why Gundam fandom has always skewed towards older fans than the child audience that Sunrise has been trying to appeal to for over four decades with entries that try to be more “fun” but lack this background thematic complexity.

Hence, while Victory Gundam is a heavily flawed show that is very inconsistent in tone, I can’t help but enjoy it as an incredibly dark take on the future past the earlier Universal Century series. Even after heroes like Amuro Ray and Char Aznable, perhaps the two most iconic Gundam characters, perish in a fight with the world at stake, it ultimately means nothing. Victory literally ends with a villainous character left to roam the Earth lacking her memory and vision because Tomino believed that fate “was a heavier punishment” than death. Not even a century later, humanity’s mistakes are once again repeated in Victory Gundam which, in its higher tolerance for violence, acts as a bitter rebuttal to the hope demonstrated in Char’s Counterattack Victory does not work very well as a standalone, but exists brilliantly as a followup to the original few entries of Gundam. This sway from the previous entry’s bittersweet hope into a lamentation of humanity’s inevitable collapse, then, works perfectly with ∀ Gundam as a followup as it demonstrates that, while warfare is inherent to humanity, people should not simply resign to that outcome. It is a powerful message which is cheesy, but ultimately works brilliantly as a capstone to Gundam as a whole. Yet still, it could not have the same impact as a finale without the existence of Victory and its pendulum shift towards the opposite extreme.